Background The task of undertaking to draft jury instructions for a statutory cause of action or defense, and thus the need to articulate elements and consider their application, can highlight questions latent in the statutory text and interpretive case law. This point certainly applies to Arkansas Code Annotated Section 23-79-107, concerning misrepresentations, omissions, concealment of facts,...

The Internal Rate of Return (IRR) is a commonly used indicator of the performance of Private Finance Initiative (PFI), schemes in the UK. Treasury guidance recognises, however, that IRR is potentially misleading, unless the relevant payment streams are of a flat, annuity, type. This paper uses data on a number of actual PFI schemes to examine whether the payment streams involved are sufficientl...

In many important economic decisions under uncertainty, the expected-utility maximizing choice is ex post optimal only if certain later states are reached. We investigate whether, outside of discounting, subjects are biased towards options faring well in early-period comparisons. We conduct neutral-context laboratory experiments to systematically investigate this bias and its interaction with a...

As the annuity market in China develops, the Chinese insurance industry is increasingly exposed to longevity risk. A large part of the risk is ‘trend risk’, which cannot be diversified by pooling, but may be transferred to capital markets through derivatives that are written on a certain mortality index. In this paper, we first explore different methods to create a standardized mortality index ...

My dissertation contains three chapters. In Chapter 1 I study the optimal consumption and portfolio choice of a retiree. Chapter 2 is an empirical study of the long-run risk model in explaining asset returns in the cross section. In Chapter 3, I study the implications of RBC models with CES production on the dynamics of labor income share and other macroeconomic variables. In Chapter 1, I solve...

In this chapter, we consider a theoretical model for the pricing and valuation of guaranteed annuity conversion options associated with certain unit-linked pension contracts in the UK. The valuation approach is based on the similarity between the payoff structure of the contract and a call option written on a coupon-bearing bond. The model makes use of a one-factor Heath-Jarrow-Morton framework...